Laura Pippig

1 week ago | pcworld.com | Laura Pippig

Windows 7 came onto the market in 2009 and put Microsoft back on the road to success after Windows Vista’s annoying failures. But Windows 7 was not without its faults, as this curious story proves. Some users apparently encountered a vexing problem at the time: if they set a single-color image as the background, their Windows 7 PC always took 30 seconds to start the operating system and switch from the welcome screen to the desktop.

2 weeks ago | pcworld.com | Laura Pippig

Even though many people like to use the web version of WhatsApp, there are still some limitations to it compared to the mobile apps. Crucially, it’s not possible to make voice calls and video calls with contacts in WhatsApp Web. But the messenger service finally seems to be changing this. A current beta version of the web client shows that users will soon be able to make calls here too.

2 weeks ago | pcworld.com | Laura Pippig

Windows 7 came onto the market in 2009 and put Microsoft back on the road to success after Windows Vista’s annoying failures. But Windows 7 was not without its faults, as this curious story proves. Some users apparently encountered a vexing problem at the time: if they set a single-color image as the background, their Windows 7 PC always took 30 seconds to start the operating system and switch from the welcome screen to the desktop.

2 weeks ago | pcworld.com | Laura Pippig |Joel Lee

For some years now, smartphones have had a built-in feature that protects against unauthorized access via USB. In iOS and Android, you get pop-ups that ask for confirmation when a data USB connection is established before you can actually start transferring data. However, this guard against “juice jacking”—a hacking method in which charging stations are manipulated to inject malicious code, steal information, or allow access to the device when plugged in—is apparently not as secure as expected.

3 weeks ago | pcworld.com | Laura Pippig |Joel Lee

A few weeks ago, we reported that a mysterious folder called “inetpub” appeared on numerous Windows PCs after one of the April updates was installed on them. The initial impression was that this was a bug, as the folder was empty and apparently served no function. Microsoft later explained that the inetpub folder is important for Windows security because it was created to patch the CVE-2025-21204 vulnerability.